An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Monarchs, Migration and Poetry

For
those of us who grew up in North America,
the Monarch was the most
recognizable of all butterflies.Large and brilliantly marked with a rich
orange/gold and black pattern they could be seen by the thousands twice a year
in their migrations between Canada and
a single Mexican forest region.Their metamorphosis
from a milkweed munching caterpillar
spinning its cocoon to its emergence
as a regal flyer was a staple of grade school science curricula.

But
all of that is under a dire threat as populations collapse with the rapid
alterations in their critical Mexican nesting grounds due to global climate change.A recent report on the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) explained:

Monarch butterflies appear headed
for a perhaps unprecedented population crash, according to scientists and
monarch watchers who have been keeping tabs on the species in their main summer
home in Eastern and Central North America.

There had been hope that on their
journey north from their overwintering zone in Mexico, the insect’s numbers
would build through the generations, but there’s no indication that happened.
Only a small number of monarchs did make it to Canada this summer to propagate
the generation that has now begun its southern migration to Mexico, and early
indications are that the past year's record lows will be followed by even lower
numbers this fall. Elizabeth Howard, the director and founder of Journey North,
a citizen-scientist effort that tracks the migrations of monarchs and other
species, says one indicator for the robustness of the monarchs is the number of
roosts they form in late August and September, something Journey North monitors
throughout the migration periods. “During migration, monarchs form overnight
roosts in places like Point Pelee or Long Point [in southern Ontario], where
the monarchs are congregating before crossing the Great Lakes, places where
people generally see huge overnight clusters of monarchs gathering.” Howard
told CBC News that at this time in 2011, Journey North had already received 55
reports of roosts, followed by just 25 in 2012. This year, only 17 reports of roosts
came in. “This is really a proxy for peak migration because this is where
people see really large numbers of monarchs and we’re just not getting the
reports, it’s looking pretty bad,” she says.

The monarch butterflies that are
now flying south are the fourth generation of those that left the few hectares
in central Mexico where millions of monarchs spend the winter.

Several years
ago while I was working as a school
custodian in Cary, Illinois, the
visit of a lone Monarch on its southward migration, a pioneer, inspired a poem
that was included in my 2004 Skinner
House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart and
was also anthologized by Edward Searl in his compilation In
Praise of Animals A Treasury of Poems, Quotations, and Readings.

Some of the
science is fuzzy—a single insect does not make the whole epic journey, it takes
four generations—but the sense of awe and wonder remains.